122 research outputs found
Near-linear time approximation algorithms for optimal transport via Sinkhorn iteration
No full textComputing optimal transport distances such as the earth mover's distance is a fundamental problem in machine learning, statistics, and computer vision. Despite the recent introduction of several algorithms with good empirical performance, it is unknown whether general optimal transport distances can be approximated in near-linear time. This paper demonstrates that this ambitious goal is in fact achieved by Cuturi's Sinkhorn Distances. This result relies on a new analysis of Sinkhorn iterations, which also directly suggests a new greedy coordinate descent algorithm GREENKHORN with the same theoretical guarantees. Numerical simulations illustrate that GREENKHORN significantly outperforms the classical SINKHORN algorithm in practice.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowship Program (1122374)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Faculty Early Career Development Program (DMS-1541099)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Faculty Early Career Development Program (DMS-1541100)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Faculty Early Career Development Program (DMS-1712596)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (W911NF-16-1-0551)United States. Office of Naval Research (N00014-17-1-2147)MIT NEC Corporation (grant
2022 floating offshore wind study
No full textsubmitted to the Oregon Legislature ; by the Oregon Department of Energy ; lead author: Jason Sierman Contributing ; authors: Todd Cornett, Deanna Henry, Jessica Reichers, Adam Schultz, Rebecca Smith, and Max Woods.Title from PDF cover (viewed on September 16, 2022)."As directed in HB 3375 (2021), this report provides a summary of important information, key findings, and recommendations for future study and engagement related to the benefits and challenges of integrating up to 3 GW of floating offshore wind into Oregon's electric grid by 2030"--Page ii.This archived document is maintained by the State Library of Oregon as part of the Oregon Documents Depository Program. It is for informational purposes and may not be suitable for legal purposes.Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-61).Mode of access: Internet from the Oregon Government Publications Collection.Text in English
A New & Improved Drift4 for Performative Speech Analysis
No full textThis article outlines Drift, a pitch-tracking software prototyped in 2016 by Robert Ochshorn and Max Hawkins. Drift measures what human listeners perceive as vocal pitch (the fundamental frequency, the vibration of the vocal cords, as measured in hertz) every 10 milliseconds in a given recording, visualizing it in an easy-to-read, horizontally scrolling pitch trace, aligned with the text being read. Author Sarah Yuniar discusses how Drift can be mobilized in order to bring interpretability to oral literature
Voice Compression and Communications: Principles and Applications for Fixes and Wireless Channels
No full textUp-to-date, expert coverage of topics in wireless voice communications Voice communication is the most important facet of mobile radio service. Even when the predicted surge of wireless data and Internet services becomes a reality, voice will remain the most natural means of human communication. Voice Compression and Communications details issues in wireless voice communications and treats compression, channel coding, and wireless transmission as a joint subject. Part I covers background material, whereas Part II provides detailed information on both proprietary and standardized analysis-by-synthesis codecs, including the speech codecs of virtually all existing wireline-based and wireless systems. Parts III and IV discuss mainly research-based wideband, audio, as well as very low-rate schemes likely to find their way into future standards. Voice Compression and Communications describes fundamental concepts in a non-mathematical way early in the book for those with only a background knowledge of signal processing and communications. More advanced readers will find detailed discussions of theoretical principles, future concepts, and solutions to various specific wireless voice communications problems
'Beats apart': a comparative history of youth culture and popular music in Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne, 1956 - 1965
No full textThis study explores the themes of continuity and change in twentieth-century British cultural history, particularities of place and regional identity in the North of England, and the cultural transfer of North American popular music in Britain between 1956 and 1965. By means of a comparative historical investigation of youth culture and popular music in Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne, the work engages with existing debate among historians surrounding the nature and extent of cultural change for the period usually referred to as „The Sixties?, and whether or not it is possible to speak of a „Cultural Revolution?. Spanning the years between the initial impact of rock „n? roll and the immediate aftermath of the Beat Boom of 1963-64, a phenomenon described by one commentator as representing „perhaps the North's greatest single cultural „putsch??, the thesis examines the role of urban and regional identity in the process of cultural production, reproduction, and consumption. Theoretical insights derived from the associated disciplines of sociology and cultural studies are employed which offer an opportunity for a novel and dynamic analysis and interpretation of the empirical historical evidence. This research is especially pertinent at a time when historians are increasingly looking to the regional and inter-regional, as opposed to the national and international, for explanations of continuity and change. There is a burgeoning interest in the history of popular culture inspired by the transition of post-modern society from one of production to consumption. Cultural and economic theorists have called for more historical investigation to inform current debates regarding the post-modern city?s ability to attract a „creative class? as a means towards urban regeneration. This study informs these debates by bringing the above themes together in a unique historical analysis of cultural continuity and change, Northern identity, and popular music
Adapting authoritarianism: institutions and co-optation in Egypt and Syria
No full textThis PhD thesis compares Egypt and Syria’s authoritarian political systems. While the tendency in social science political research treats Egypt and Syria as similarly authoritarian, this research emphasizes differences between the two systems with special reference to institutions and co-optation. Rather than reducibly understanding Egypt and Syria as sharing similar histories, institutional arrangements, or ascribing to the oft-repeated convention that “Syria is Egypt but 10 years behind,” this thesis focuses on how events and individual histories shaped each states current institutional strengthens and weaknesses. Specifically, it explains the how varying institutional politicization or de-politicization affects each state’s capabilities for co-opting elite and non-elite individuals.
Beginning with a theoretical framework that considers the limited utility of democratization and transition theoretical approaches, the work underscores the persistence and durability of authoritarianism. Chapter two details the politicized institutional divergence between Egypt and Syria that began in the 1970s. Chapter three and four examines how institutional politicization or de-politicization affects elite and non-elite individual co-optation in Egypt and Syria. Chapter five discusses the study’s general conclusions and theoretical implications.
This thesis’s argument is that Egypt and Syria co-opt elites and non-elites differently because of the varying degrees of institutional politicization in each governance system. Rather than view one country as more politically developed than the other, this work argues that Syria’s political institutions are more politicized than their Egyptian counterparts. Syria’s political arena is, thus, described as politicized-patrimonialism. Syria’s politicized-patrimonial arena produces uneven co-optation of elites and non-elites as they are diffused through competing institutions. Conversely, the Egyptian political arena remains highly personalized as weak institutions and individuals are manipulated and molded according to the president’s ruling clique. This is referred to as personalized-patrimonialism. As a consequence, Egypt’s political establishment demonstrates more flexibility in ad hoc altering and adapting its arena depending on the emergence of crises.
This study’s theoretical implications suggest that, contrary to modernization and democratization theory’s adage that institutions lead to a political development, politicized institutions within a patrimonial order actually hinder regime adaptation because consensus is harder to achieve and maintain. It is within this context that Egypt’s de-politicized institutional framework advantages its top political elite. In this reading of Egyptian and Syrian politics, Egypt’s personalized political arena is more adaptable than Syria’s. These conclusions do not indicate that political reform is a process underway in either state
Deformation spines satisfy an exponential isoperimetric inequality
No full textWe prove that the barycentric spine of bounded complexity for a deformation space, in the sense of Max Forester, satisfies an exponential isoperimetric inequality. The proof gives a new application to combing rectangles once used to prove that the free splitting complex is hyperbolic. We also give new insights into the geometry and dynamics of self equivariant foldable maps as an unexpected area of study necessary to finish the proof.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Assessing Nonprofit Websites: Developing an Evaluation Model
No full textNonprofit organizations are pivotal actors in society, and their websites can play important roles in aiding organizations in their socially-beneficial missions by serving as a platform to present information, to interact with stakeholders and to perform online transactions. This dissertation analyzed nonprofit websites in the United States (U.S.) and in Thailand in a series of three articles. The first developed a website evaluative instrument, based on an e-commerce model, and applied it to nonprofit websites through a manual decoding process. That article's findings suggested that Thai websites are not considerably different than U.S. nonprofit websites, except more American websites offer online transactions. The second article analyzed two different types of nonprofits in Thailand using the same model to assess website development in an emerging market. That analysis suggested local Thai nonprofits' websites lagged significantly behind those of internationally connected nonprofit organizations in the country in the features they offered. The third article compared the adapted model employed in the second analysis, which used manual decoding for website examination, to a commercially available, automated evaluation service. That analysis highlighted the differences between the two assessment tools and found them to be complementary, but independently insufficient to ensure robust nonprofit website evaluation.Ph. D.Nonprofit organizations, such as public charities, are integral in our society. With increased Internet access, members of the general public often visit nonprofit websites to learn about such institutions. Nonprofits, however, lack a systematic tool to analyze how well their websites are developing and whether they are successful in securing their aims. This dissertation developed and applied an evaluative model to examine nonprofit entity website features and efficacy in the United States and in Thailand. The analysis found U.S. and international nonprofits websites were better developed than local Thai organizations, but still evidenced significant design challenges. Comparing the results of the developed evaluation model to those produced by a commercial automated assessment tool, the author found neither to be sufficient alone for measuring the quality of nonprofit websites
The workshop as the work: white anti-racism organising in 1960s, 70s, and 80s US social movements
No full textThis thesis explores the rise of anti-racism workshops developed by white activists in various United States social movements from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. The shifting ideology of the black freedom movement in the late 1960s, from integration to Black Power, transformed white activists‘ place within racial justice struggles. While recent scholarship has begun to turn its attention towards whites‘ ongoing racial justice activities, one of the most radical and widespread of these efforts is consistently overlooked: anti-racism workshops. Increasingly prevalent from the late 1960s through to the diversity-trainings explosion of the 1990s, this thesis demonstrates that these workshops had their roots in the black freedom, women‘s liberation and gay liberation movements. White activists from these movements led these workshops in order to examine white racial domination and privilege within both leftist social movements and larger US society.
Analysing case studies from the black freedom, women‘s liberation and gay liberation/rights movements, this thesis explores the foundational assumptions of anti-racism workshops. It seeks to explain how and why these efforts sought to frame race and racism as issues of knowledge and consciousness and why such efforts constituted radical praxis. It is argued that early anti-racism workshops were pedagogical projects that sought to confront the racial ignorance that structured the lives of whites in the US, including progressives and their liberation movements. This thesis draws attention to the efficacy and power of these workshops in terms of their epistemological effects, in the transformations they brought about in whites‘ understanding, or awareness, of racial realities
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